Mobile Interactive Assistant

MIA is a smart, interactive virtual asistant, that provides customers to complete banking transactions self-service by voice in Mobile Banking Platform and occupies a very special place among similar applications in the world with its complex grammar structure and the ability to provide service for 155 different needs based on natural speech.

Innovation presentation

Voice technologies are becoming an indispensable part of digital technologies. As the habit of performing transactions through Call Centers by dialing gave way to natural speech, performing transactions by voice has also started to become a replacement for touch-based communication. We are developing voice applications that are completely natural speech oriented. As with the natural process that takes place when you are talking with a branch or customer representative, we are aiming to provide the same ease and convenience in our projects.

Garanti Bank has been using voice technologies for a long time. In this context, the primary area of implementation our call center, Alo Garanti Call Steering project for Alo Garanti, and Alo Garanti self-service steps (ASR) are the pioneering projects in voice technologies.

Mobile Interactive Assistant (MIA) is a virtual voice assistant that provides performing banking transactions by voice which is developed on Garanti Bank’s mobile platform. MIA is the first application that is compatible with Turkish language structure and through which banking transactions can be performed by natural speech. Business team, analyst and development teams are involved to the project.

With MIA, users can enquire many banking transactions. Here are some examples; “How much money did I spend to fuel-oil from my Platinum card?”, “What is the maturity date of my deposit account?” , “Send 100 USD to David.”

1,7 mio of 3 mio Mobile Banking whom the functions has met with MİA, and rated the application as most innovative function that they had experienced.

Uniqueness of the project

This application was developed on “Natural Language Understanding” infrastructure to understand users in their own language and sentences. In this application which was developed on NINA product of Nuance, the users don't have to express the transaction they want to perform by using certain structured phrases in banking language. Users are served with upper segment natural speech understanding capacity.

MIA is a one of a kind application in terms of financial institutions in the world. Through the application which was developed with an extensive grammar and comprehension capacity, all banking transactions can be performed by voice, through 155 different intents and 65 different concepts. This application, for which “iOS Siri” would be the closest example we give, is anticipated to be used as a benchmark across the world.

MIA provides users the opportunity to perform transactions on Mobile Banking in a much faster and easier way. For example, in a money transfer transaction, while first the account must be selected, then the recipient must be selected, and finally the amount must be entered, the same transaction can be easily completed through MIA with a single sentence such as “I want to send 100 USD to Alex from my account at İstanbul Branch”. MIA not only can process simple requests such as “I will transfer money”, but can also understand much more complex and user-specific requests and enable the completion of the transactions.

With the experience Garanti Bank acquired in the area of voice technologies, Call Steering and Alo Garanti Self-Service Transactions have become a quick and easy transaction method for the users as well, and was established as a system. This success has also the triggered the initiation of MIA.

As Garanti Bank, the regular investments we make in mobile banking take shape according to advancing technology and market dynamics, and become diversified both in smart phone applications and in mobile browsers.